The contest that is designed to give teens a chance of making a useful contribution to open source software has just started - and it's not just coding. There are other tasks to choose from.

This is the third year that Google has run a challenge to bring together open source organizations and pre-university students aged 13 to 17 who may be thinking about including computer science in their future plans. It can also seen as a first step, a foot-in-the-door move, to getting accepted as a university student for the Google Summer of Code,

Last year, 542 students from 56 countries competed in the contest and there were 10 grand prize winners who won a trip to Google’s Mountain View California campus. This year ten open source projects have been selected as mentoring organizations and each of them will nominate 2 students among the five who score the most points as Grand Prize winners.

There are no cash awards for this contest - participants gain certificates for completing tasks and win tee-shirts for completing three or more.

The main reward of this program is the contact it establishes with mentors within open source organizations and the satisfaction of completing worthwhile tasks.

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